History of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God https://www.bibliographia.co/ontological-proof.htm Bibliographia. Annotated bibliographies by Raul Corazzon | e-mail: [email protected] History of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God INTRODUCTION "Philosophers who address the questions of what it is for an individual to exist, or what it is for an individual to be actual, often do so with reference to the fallacy they have uncovered in the classical Ontological Argument for God's existence. Indeed, the Ontological Argument is useful as a vehicle by which this and other issues in ontology and the philosophy of logic may be introduced and sharpened." Nathan Salmon - Existence - in: Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 1 " Metaphysics" edited by James E. Tomberlin, 1987, p. 49. "Higher-type classical logic is intensional logic with the intensional features removed, so this is a good place to start. Ontological arguments, Gödel's in particular, are natural examples of intensional logic at work, so this is a good place to finish." (page XI) "There are many directions form which people have tried to prove the existence of God. There have been arguments based on design: a complex universe must have a designer. There have been attempts to show that the existence of an ethical sense implies the existence of God. There have been arguments based on causality: trace chain of effect and cause backward and one must reach a fist cause. Ontological arguments seek to establish the existence of God based on pure logic: the principles of reasoning require that God be part of ones ontology." (p. 133) Melvin Fitting - Types, tableaus and Gödel's God - Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2002. "Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the one which Anselm first formulated is the most refined and the least capable of a finally satisfactory statement. It draws its strength from an ambiguity, which appears to be an ambiguity in language, but is more deeply an ambiguity in human experience. If God exists, there must be a level of experience at which it is impossible to think of God as not existing. But at what level can this impossibility be made to appear? Must the demonstration await the experience of the Beatific Vision? Or can it, at the very opposite extreme, be made out at the level of linguistic-logical analysis? Whether valid or not, the first three chapters of the Proslogion were the first piece of writing in which this problem was raised and a solution proposed which will probably never be finally buried. It may be agreed that Descartes put it better, because more simply and with fewer philosophical presuppositions. He had the advantage, which Anselm lacked, of inheriting, if only to reject, a long philosophical tradition. The Augustinian and grammatical background of Anselm's thought, which made it possible for him to formulate the argument, also burdened it with limitations. But these pages of Anselm must be placed among the most deeply interesting pieces of reasoning ever written The early chapters of the Proslogion, in which the argument was first expressed, will never be read without excitement, nor thought about without appearing to be more cogent than they are. For the most extraordinary thing about the argument is that it loses nothing of its power, its freshness, or even in a curious way its persuasiveness, by being refuted. The Proslogion may not set forth a valid argument for belief in God, and even if it were valid it is doubtful whether it would ever persuade an unbeliever; but in its subtlety, and in a certain unsubstantial, ethereal quality which antagonizes men of robust common 1 di 11 09/02/2019, 12:33 History of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God https://www.bibliographia.co/ontological-proof.htm sense, it perfectly reflects the quality and mystery of Anselm's personality." (pp. 74-75). Richard William Southern - Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059-c. 1130, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. "The ontological argument for the existence of Cod has fascinated philosophers ever since it was formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). It is doubtful, I think, that any person was ever brought to a belief in God by this argument, and unlikely that it has played the sort of role in strengthening and confirming religious belief that, for example, the teleological argument has played. To the unsophisticated, Anselm's argument is (at first sight at least) remarkably unconvincing, if not downright irritating, it smacks too much of word magic. And yet almost every major philosopher from the time of Anselm to the present has had his say about it; the last few years have seen a remarkable flurry of interest in it. What accounts for this fascination? Not, I think, the religious significance of the argument, although no doubt that can be underrated. The cause is perhaps twofold. First, the ontological argument offers an enormous return on a pretty slim investment - a definition, and a perplexing but not altogether implausible premise connecting existence and 'greatness,' yield the theistic conclusion. Second, although the argument certainly looks at first sight as if it ought to be unsound, it is profoundly difficult to say what exactly is wrong with it. Indeed, it is doubtful that any philosopher has given a really convincing and thorough refutation of the ontological argument. Too often philosophers merely remark that Kant refuted the argument by showing that existence is not a predicate and that 'one cannot build bridges from the conceptual realm to the real world.' But it is very doubtful that Kant specified a sense of 'is a predicate' such that, in that sense, it is clear both that existence is not a predicate and that Anselm's argument requires that it be one. Nor are the mere claims that no existential propositions are necessary or the above comment about bridge building impressive as refutations of Anselm - after all, he claims to have an argument for the necessity of at least one existential proposition. So one must either show just where his argument goes wrong, or else produce a solid argument for the claim that no existential (in the appropriate sense) propositions can be necessary-and this, I think, no one has succeeded in doing." Alvin Plantinga - God and others minds. A study of the rational justification of belief in God. - Cornell University Press (1967) pp. 26-27. "PROSLOGION 2-4 consists of four pages. Barth's book about them ["Fides Quaerens Intellectum" (1931)] has 165 pages. All the books and essays written about them in the last eight hundred years would fill libraries. It is a legitimate question to ask, What is it, in these four pages, that makes them so potent a challenge to the best minds of humanity? What is the spell they cast over the reader so that occupation with them becomes a passionate enterprise? These pages do not seem to have the completeness and remoteness of a classic; rather, they seem to call on the reader personally to do something about them. They arouse in him an intellectual passion -- either for or against them -- which makes him feel that the core of his own thinking is being touched. On the one hand, they seem so concise that nothing can be added, on the other, so loose that everything still has to be done. But what? The reader feels puzzled, teased, imposed upon. He feels called to take a personal part in a herculean intellectual struggle. The reason for this spell -- which was already felt in Anselm's life time --cannot be solely Anselm's subject matter, for this has treated by many before and after with less than intriguing effects. It must be, to a large degree, his method. But what can there be so exciting about a logical demonstration?" Robert S. Hartman - Prolegomena to a meta-Anselmian axiomatic - Review of Metaphysics, XIV, 4, 2 di 11 09/02/2019, 12:33 History of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God https://www.bibliographia.co/ontological-proof.htm June 1961 p. 637. "No logician wishes to deny that in ordinary speech sentences such as 'tame tigers exist' can be used with perfect propriety. Some of them may be false, but it is not for the logician to determine which are and which are not. If, however, we assume that grammatical form is a sure guide to logical structure, we may be tempted to say that in these sentences the word 'existence' stands for a predicate, where 'predicate' has a logical sense distinct from its grammatical sense. That some philosophers have taken the word 'existence' to stand for a predicate in the logical sense, i.e., for an attribute, may be seen from their use of the ontological argument to prove the existence of God. Descartes' exposition of the argument is clearer than most others. He starts from the position, supposed to be already established, that we can know some propositions, e.g., simple theorems of mathematics, to be necessarily true. It does not matter for our purposes whether he thinks that his necessary propositions are analytic or synthetic, although we may remark in passing that the language in which he refers to them suggests that they are analytic. He wishes to say that the proposition that God exists can be proved in the same way as that in which a necessary proposition of mathematics is proved.(...) [His] argument is based on the assumption that 'God exists' is a proposition of the same sort as a theorem of geometry. Descartes writes as though both propositions predicated something of a subject, the one being about 'God,' the other about 'the triangle.' If he did not assume this, he would not say that they can be proved in the same fashion.